I am glad that you have decided to research for stock market on your own instead of falling for a mass perception about stock market investment being equal to Gambling. And I came to the conclusion that you are researching because you have decided to search for this topic to find the right answer for this specific query. Only a researcher or someone with open mind seeks for answers and not someone who follows the mass blindly. To answer the query whether investing in stock market is gambling is not,first let us lookinto two things.  1) Gambling 2) Stock Market

Gambling :
Gambling is any activity you put money purely on the basis of luck to earn good returns. Gambling  happens without any calculations, analysis or research. Betting your money in any sports is gambling as you don’t know who is going to win or lose.  It is something where you don’t have to use your brain to see thing and make strategies. It is purely luck game.

Stock Market :
A company needs funds to run the business. Many companies go public to invite public to jointly invest in their endeavor. Stock Market is a system or place where the investment in these companies take place via purchasing shares of the company.

Stock market is not gambling :
Now you have spare money to invest somewhere. You decided to invest them in stock market. You don’t have much information about history of all the companies, their share pricing, history of their share pricing going up and down. You invest purely on the basis of so called expert advises or tips provided by a friend or stock market experts who come on TV or tips given by your share broker. You put money where they ask you to put. You put money when they ask you to put. You sell them as soon as the share price goes down and you think value of your stocks investment has gone down and then to prevent further lose of money. This is Gambling. Not the stock market itself but how you understand stock market and what you do with your stocks based on your decision taking abilities decides your fate.

Now think the other-way. You have 5,00,000 rs. spare and you want to invest it somewhere. Fixed deposit can earn you maximum 9% return a year. Investing in GOLD you find equally gambling as you may think of stock market as the pricing of gold also fluctuates frequently. 5,00,000 is not enough for investment in real estate property. So, you take decision to invest money in Stock Market. Your next move is to decide target return on investment. It has to be more than 9% which you are getting in fix deposit without any risk. Lets say you set target return of 20% per annum. Now you need to find stocks which give you 20% return a year. By studying annual charts of various stocks, You find certain scrips which give more return than what you are looking for. Bang. You invest there expecting the same trend to continue. When a year ends, it actually happens that your predicting come outs true and you have got return. This happens most the time. Thus, this is not gambling.

But what happens is, you can not sleep after investing and wake up after a year. study the first quarter from the date of your investment. See if the stock market is going in the same direction as per your desire. If it is happening,  have a smile. If it is not, then again wait for couple of more months. Now after a month or two if the situation is again the same then you need to find a exit strategy to not to make a loss. If you see certain percent return say, 5% return only by the end of almost 6 months, sell the stocks,book profit and take exit. Thus your are neither making a loss nor making exact return you had expected.  As soon as the price go down of the same stock, buy them again and wait for them to surge upto 5 to 6%. Possibly they will surge in a month. You will have 10% percent return in just 8-9 months which is higher than fixed deposit. You have remaining months in a year to book more profit with monthly trading the same way we explained just before. This time keep return targets less 2-3%. earning 2% return for two months is 14 percent. Thus you will have approx 14-16% returns a year by trading the same stock 2 to 3 times a year. The secret is, you keep the stocks as it is, there won’t be much surge in pricing from the buying date. What you do is, buy and sell the same stock multiple times as price keep fluctuating every second. Buy the stocks at lower price, sell them at higher price.

The more safer strategy would be doing monthly trading of the same stock with 2-3 percent expected return per month. This will be safer bet and has more chances of earning your profit from stock market as most stocks’ pricing will fluctuate 2-3%  a month.

Doing this multiple trading requires good research about daily, monthly, quarterly and annual trends of various stocks, your risktaking ability, decision making skills and most importantly PATIENCE. You have got them, then  Investing in Stock market is not Gambling but a fantastic decision for which you will bless yourself.  Go. Study the market. Study the charts and history. Set your goals and Start trading. Happy Investing !!!